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DC Heroes
DC Heroes is an out-of-print superhero role-playing game set in the DC Universe, published by Mayfair Games. Other than sharing the same licensed setting, DC Heroes is unrelated to the West End Games DC Universe. DC Heroes was critically well-received, and despite its out of print status still retains an unusually large and active online community (Statistics). Gameplay The game system in DC Heroes is sometimes called the Mayfair Exponential Game System (or MEGS). DC Heroes uses a logarithmic scale for character attributes. The scale allows characters of wildly different power levels to co-exist within the same game without one completely dominating a given area. For example, although Superman is on orders of magnitude far stronger than Batman, Batman is capable of surviving a straight brawl with Superman for a short period. Conflicts are resolved using an Action Table and two ten-sided dice. The die rolling system involves re-rolling any double result (the same number of both dice), so that any result is possible. Hero Points, which are used as experience points, can be spent during play to influence Action Table Results. History Mayfair Games published the first edition in 1985. During the same time-frame, DC released its twelve-part "maxi-series" Crisis on Infinite Earths, which dramatically reshaped the DC universe. As a result of this timing, both Silver Age and pre-Crisis writeups were included alongside new, post-Crisis versions of the characters. While it was groundbreaking in its time, this edition of the game is now considered obsolete by the online community. The second edition, published in 1989, incorporated material from the Batman Role-Playing Game and the Superman Sourcebook. These materials included rules for advantages, drawbacks, and gadgetry. The third edition, published in 1993, further refined the rules by revamping the point costs of various abilities. Blood of Heroes Mayfair Games eventually sold the rights to the Mayfair Exponential Game System to another company, Pulsar Games, which later released the Blood of Heroes role-playing game. Blood of Heroes is largely derived from the third edition of DC Heroes but without a license to use DC Comics' intellectual property. DC-brand characters were instead replaced with new characters created specifically for the Blood of Heroes universe. The setting included with the game is a 1990s-style superhero world with a heavy influence of occult and magical beings, which accounts for the much more detailed magic system included in the game. A subsequent edition, Blood of Heroes: Special Edition, incorporated a large number of rule tweaks as well as lots of new material, often derived from proposals from the online community. In 2004 Pulsar Games was sold to new owners. Since then, nothing has been done official with the game, leaving it inactive. Status of the MEGS Game System as of February 2009 The original owners of Pulsar sold the company to its current owners in late 2003 (http://www.pulsargamesinc.com/). The new owners have stated their intention to continue the Blood of Heroes line as recently as March of 2007 (See message #39370 of the DC Heroes Yahoo Group) but cited the need to address certain issues first, including the legal question of the game's ownership. Ray Winninger, author of the DC Heroes RPG Second Edition and editorial director for Mayfair's DC Heroes line, summarized his understanding of the ownership question as follows: "1) Our contract with DC specified that DC Comics holds the copyright on every product we released. If you check the indices, you'll note they all say 'Copyright © DC Comics Inc.' The contracts didn't specify anything like 'Mayfair owns the copyright to the actual game rules, while DC retains the rights to its IP' or anything similar, just 'all DCH products are copyright DC Comics-period.' This would suggest that DC actually owns DC HEROES. I know for certain that DC *believes* they own all rights to the game and everything produced for it and I suspect they're probably right. "2) Greg Gorden believes that his contract specified that he retained ownership of the DCH game system once DCH was out of print. When I was at Mayfair I looked for this agreement and couldn't find it-but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One potential problem is that it's unclear that Mayfair could have made such an arrangement with Greg in the first place. Remember, the DC licensing agreement specified that DC would retain full and perpetual copyright over everything we released. "3) Pulsar licensed DCH from Mayfair but it's not 100% clear that Mayfair ever had the necessary rights to grant such a license in the first place (#1 and #2 above)." (Quoted from message #45554 of the DC Heroes Yahoo Group) John Colagioia, one of the new owners of Pulsar Games, commented on their current status in March 2007: "We've been dealing frequently with the owner's legal team to try to get a handle on who owns what, who licenses/can license what, and how much room there is to change things. When I have an update of use, I'll relate it here, because it'll mean big things are coming on Pulsar's side, too." (Quoted from message #38995 of the DC Heroes Yahoo Group) As of February 1st, 2009, no further public statements have been made by any of the involved parties as to the current status of the game. External links * Official [http://www.pulsargamesinc.com/ Blood of Heroes] website * [http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dc-heroes/ DC Heroes Yahoo Group] - main online community for the game * Writeups.org – very large database of detailed character writeups for MEGS * Character Index – MEGS statistics for and general information on DC universe characters * DC Character Builder – character creation software * Pen & Paper RPG Database - details on DC Heroes products Heroes Category:Superhero role-playing games Category:Role-playing games based on comics Category:Mayfair Games games es:DC Heroes it:DC Heroes pt:DC Heroes